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In the article “We Don’t Need No Education,” Ben Hewitt describes the schooling of his two sons. There is almost nothing formal about it. The two simply explore the world, taking up one interest and then another, encountering what is around them by catching and cooking fish, building shelters and longbows, and caring for dwarf goats. They are not trapped within the four walls of a classroom, looking at pictures and reading blurbs in a textbook; rather, they are in contact with reality.
Hewitt notes in the article that he and his wife give some structure to the boys’ learning, thought they also give them a great deal of responsibility and freedom. I suspect that some level of discipline and oversight is quite important to a full education, if only because those who are more experienced can point us in directions we would not otherwise think to go. But I find in the education of these two boys a remedy for what I consider one of the chief problems in education today: that we talk about things that we have not sensed and experienced, that we try to understand when we have not yet learned to see.
John Senior was a co-founder of the Pearson Integrated Humanities program at the University of Kansas. The founders took seriously the idea that students in the modern world had not been educated in the use of their senses, either exterior or interior: they had not spent enough time watching insects or playing in the mud or roping cattle, nor had they learned to respond well to poetry, music, or art. They focused their program on developing the senses, our ability to contact the world around us, since without this foundation further thinking was bound to lead to dead ends. To this end students watched the stars, learned how to dance, and discussed poetry. Senior and the other professors often quoted Winston from Orwell’s 1984, who, to keep his sanity in the face of Party propaganda, repeated to himself “stones are hard and water is wet” (Bethel, 4). They considered the starting point of education to be attention to the senses, to experience.
In this way, I agree with and heartily recommend Hewitt’s educational method. His boys will recognize that stones are hard and water is wet, simply because they have dashed their shins upon stones and drenched themselves in the river. Descartes famously founded the ‘method of doubt’ while sitting in a warm room, thinking and writing the Meditations on First Philosophy. I am of the opinion that this was the beginning of a dead end street for philosophy, for once you step outside of the world of the senses there is no way back to reality, and love of wisdom fades. If Descartes had pondered on epistemology while stubbing his toes on boulders in a river, he might have come to different conclusions. There is something dreadfully bracing about reality when you let it come crashing in upon you.
Most of my students (Juniors in high school) have already conceived a hatred of poetry. They see it as an unnecessary convolution of language, stating what could be said more clearly in a whimsical manner. They have not been led to experience well Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty, and learned that great poetry uses words in the only possible manner to convey a particular sort of encounter with reality. Their inner senses – their sensitivity to words – has not been cultivated. And I think that it is an indictment of the education they have received.
If being freed from the classroom better enables students to come into contact with reality, than we should let them go! I suspect that there are great things that can be done in the classroom, so perhaps I would not be quite so radical – but the more we can make our classroom like the exploration of a summer farm, the better.
References:
Bethel, Father Francis, OSB. John Senior and the Restoration of Realism. Merrimack, NH: Thomas More
College Press, 2016.
Hewitt, Ben. “We Don’t Need No Education” in Outside.
https://www.outsideonline.com/1928266/we-dont-need-no-education. Accessed June 25,
2020.